Hospitals and other caregiving institutions typically employ a number of different electronic device and data systems to carry out many of the functions of the hospital. These different data systems often utilize incompatible signaling and communication protocols for the various types of systems, which can include Admit-Discharge-Transfer (ADT), physician order entry (POE), electronic Medicine Administration Record (eMAR), and others. Certain data systems, for example a medication management system such as the Pyxis MedStation™ system, receive information from one or more of these other systems on a continuous basis. As each data system may use a different message protocol or data structure, messages cannot be sent directly from one data system to another without customizing one or both data systems. Further, different manufacturers will also use different protocols, making control and communication between data systems very difficult. The maintenance and updating of multiple customized data systems to communicate within a complicated interconnected network of data systems within a hospital is a complex and sizeable task.
In some instances, a hospital environment may include one or more messaging conversion systems to facilitate communication between the different data systems across multiple sites. However, deploying, upgrading, or extending the messaging conversion systems can become extremely difficult to perform and even harder to validate, which may lead to a reduction in service or reliability of the data exchange for the large hospital systems that depend the most upon this type of integration to provide quality care to their patients.